AT&T offers $20 naked DSL, if you know where to look

Just like its $10 DSL option, AT&T has quietly introduced its $20 "naked" DSL …

As customers continue to shift their telephone needs away from traditional landlines and over to cell and VoIP services, DSL users still face the problem of hanging onto broadband without their landline phone connection. Speakeasy has made a name for itself by offering naked DSL, but it's not available in all areas, and most telcos would rather not give up a major revenue generator by allowing customers to bypass the landline. But AT&T agreed earlier this year, as part of its conditions for acquiring BellSouth, that it would introduce a standalone DSL option by the end of 2007.

As pointed out to us by DSL Reports, that day has already come and gone without much fanfare from AT&T. The company began offering its $19.95 DSL-only service on December 20, which apparently comes without contract and no landline. However, some digging around AT&T's site yields—to no one's surprise—confusing and conflicting options.

The service is referred to as DSL Lite, but the only mention of DSL Lite I could find on AT&T's site is in a press release about the service's introduction in the Southwest in June. There is, however, a similarly-priced $19.99 DSL option that does require a landline, but has no contract (that's clearly not it). Finally, I was able to find an AT&T Yahoo! High-Speed Internet "Basic" option for $19.95 per month with a downstream speed of up to 768kbps—it has no landline requirement but it does apparently require a one-year contract. The next tier up, "Express," appears to be the closest to this mythical, contract-less $20 deal I can get where I live—it goes for $23.99 with no landline, no contract, and offers 1.5Mbps down. That's not a bad deal, but if we're picking nits, it's clear that AT&T is making this $19.95 option difficult to find and relatively undesirable.

That should come as no surprise, though. In June, AT&T (also quietly) introduced a $10 DSL option as part of its merger agreement. The 768Kbps down, 128Kbps up service came with a landline, came with a one-year contract, and was limited to new customers only. It was slightly more buried in the company's web site than the new naked DSL option, too, leading critics to blast the company for not doing enough to advertise the new service. In August, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson defended the move, claiming that it wasn't difficult to find at all, but that customers just plain didn't want the $10 option.

As is the case with the $10 DSL offering, AT&T is only required to offer the $20 naked DSL option for the next two and a half years. After that, the company is free to make whatever changes it wants to the service. Given how little it has marketed either option, it's pretty clear that when those two and a half years are up, AT&T will probably kill them both off.